Lovesong of Tanzania

“Let us go, then, you and I.”
From “The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock” by T.S. Eliot

Going in Tanzania is mostly communal. A small bus bouncing on a rocky road groans with the weight of too many people packed elbow to cheek, cheek to cheek, stomach to chin. Men and women march together by the road balancing freight on their heads.

If people are not going, they are waiting, and their waiting becomes going.

One day I arrived at the college campus in Moshi Town expecting to teach at 8:00 a.m. and learned from students that the schedule had changed, that our classroom had changed, and now I had four hours to wait. I graded essays under the canvas roof of the makeshift canteen, situated on the only grass on campus, until my feet were so bitten by insects that I had to move. I needed to shop for Christmas gifts, and I had time. Going seemed to be the thing to do, but it meant some uncertainty. While I knew where the closest bus stand was, I did not know what bus to take to return back to the campus. When my colleague James stopped to ask me a question, I asked him for directions.

James is basically a snake in character, which isn’t being kind to snakes. In the past four conversations I’ve had with James, nothing he has said turned out to be true. At tea time once, he stopped our conversation abruptly to say he had a class to teach. Two minutes later I found him in the hallway of the administration building pacing outside an office. Another time, he had informed me that the new schedule for teaching was posted on the bulletin board. I found no such schedule.

But the real reason not to trust James had to do with a much earlier incident a couple months ago when I was having tea with a student worker. James came into the dining hall and reminded the student, Sarah, that as his African sister, she should serve him some tea. She did it. I asked James what he did for her as her brother. He came up with a good list and I asked him how many of those he had already done for her, which brought about a change in topic. At another tea time when he told the student again that he wanted her to serve him tea, I reminded him that he had a healthy set of arms and legs to serve himself. And then at another tea time, James walked to my table where I sat sipping tea and told me that since Sarah was not there to serve him, he would go out and find her. I knew then that James did not like me.

Last week I found out James would be my tutor for my seminars. This means I have to work with James. I will tell him what material he should cover with my students who will be grouped into sections much smaller than 160 students in my lectures. It also means that when James told me he had a master’s degree, he was lying because people with master’s degrees are lecturers, not tutors.

When I asked James what bus to take for the return from bus terminal to campus, I knew James would not recognize the truth if it struck him down. James’s instructions were long and tortuous, but when I started to write down place names he mentioned, the instructions became more focused: take a bus that says “Mbuyuni.”

To worry about whether James’s advice was good or not—that would’ve been a definite refusal to go for the ride.

At the bus terminal, I stopped and asked a man and woman seated on a bench where the Mbuyuni bus was. They pointed to the end of the terminal. Then the woman said a few words, some of which I understood: “wait” and “let’s go.”

She took me by the hand and led me across the street. The person who takes me by the hand, despite the sweat and dust of my fingers, is the one who wants me to find the way, the one who walks the distance in the hot sun to make sure that I have gotten what I asked for. This woman who took my grimy hand would not let go until we had crossed the street, until she had hailed the Mbuyuni bus, that is, the second Mbuyuni bus because the first one took off after briefly stopping for two seconds.

The bus traveled to the right section of town, but I did not see the Moshi Town campus anywhere. I saw the Tanzanian Breweries Limited factory near the Moshi Town campus. But I didn’t know what to ask for. Maybe the bus would arrive at a place that I would recognize. Soon enough, I was the only passenger, and the conductor said another word that I recognized: “mwisho,” “the end.” The end was a little subsection of Moshi with chickens and goats and a field of some crop I didn’t recognize and a road and shops that I didn’t recognize.

The conductor pointed to another bus headed in the opposite direction. I boarded it and after greeting a friendly woman beside me, I managed to ask about the Moshi Town campus. A man in the front seat seemed to know it and after the bus made its first stop, he told me to go with him. Though he did not take me by the hand, he led me through long passages between houses at a very fast clip, and after we managed to exhaust our foreign language supply, we walked at a fast clip in silence and burning sun. Suddenly the Moshi Town campus appeared. I was led once again by someone who merely said, “Let’s go.”

“Let us go, then, you and I” is a call to go to the unknown, to knowingly follow the advice of a snake, not with trust but out of the yearning to go. The call is also a hand that takes my grimy one because it wants me to go where it takes me. To answer the call is to discover what love is.